Transformative Art Prize awards more than $100,000 to five arts projects aimed at changing public spaces

July 01, 2014|By Mary Carole McCauley, The Baltimore Sun

Five community art projects, including a sculptural weather station featuring a giant pig, a children's garden full of upward-growing, kinetic "sculptures" and Baltimore's tallest mural, will begin transforming some of Baltimore's underused public spaces later this year.

The Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts has announced the winners of the annual Transformative Arts Prize. This year, PNC Bank will donate more than $100,000 to enable artists working with neighborhood residents to permanently reinvent vacant lots, parks and streetscapes.

The projects include:

•$25,000 to create a children's garden in what now is a vacant lot at the intersection of Harford Road and 32nd Street. Artists Katey Truhn and Jessie Unterhalter will work with neighborhood residents to create eight to 10 treelike sculptures that will be topped with mandalas that will move with the wind.

•$30,000 to create the 35-foot tall stainless steel weather station featuring Pigtown's porcine mascot at the intersection of Washington Boulevard and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Residents will work with artist Rodney Carroll.

• $28,000 to enable artist Amy Sherald to work with residents of Station North to design and install Baltimore's tallest mural at the J. Van Story Branch apartment building at 11 W. 20th St. The mural will be visible from Druid Hill Park, the Jones Falls Expressway and throughout West Baltimore.

•$10,000 each to artist Laure Drogoul to produce the 11th annual Transmodern Arts Festival in the Bromo Arts District and to the Creative Alliance in Patterson Park to produce the 2014 Great Halloween Lantern Parade.